- Author: Heikkila, Kim
- Title: "Everybody thinks it's right to give the child away" - Unwed Mothers at Booth Memorial Hospital, 1961-63
- Language: English
- Journal: Minnesota History 65, 6: 229-241
- Publication Year: 2017
- Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
■ Excerpt from the Foreword Sharon Lee Moore, the young woman who entered Booth that day in 1961, was my mother. She was nearly nine months along by the time she turned herself over to the Salvation Army staff and social workers who would usher her through the final days of her pregnancy. She delivered her baby, a girl, on January 16; then surrendered her for adoption so that, as she would write many years later, the child would not “start life as an ‘illegitimate’ little person doomed to failure because of me.” She named her baby Lynette, counted her fingers and toes, and then let her go. Several days later, she left Booth emptyarmed and heavy-hearted. For the next 33 years—through marriage to my father, my birth on Mother’s Day 1968 and that of my brother in 1970, and a 20-year career in marketing at Carlson Companies—she carried her burden in silence. Then, in 1994, “Lynette” found her birth mother, releasing our mother from her secret.
[...]
After my mother died, in 2009, I realized that I had squandered the opportunity to ask her more about her adoption decision. Instead, I began researching the history of Booth Memorial Hospital and its onetime residents in hopes that learning more about them would help me know my mother better. In the process, I found a unique source: interviews conducted by University of Minnesota social work professor Gisela Konopka and her assistant, Vernie-Mae Czaky, with 33 “Booth girls” in October 1963. These interviews feature the voices of the unwed mothers-to-be rather than the social welfare experts whose perspectives typically dominated public discourse about single pregnant girls and the organizations designed to serve them.4 Unlike the retrospective accounts written by these birth mothers decades later, the Konopka interviews provide a glimpse into a crucial moment in time for these young women as they teetered on the edge of a culturally proscribed motherhood. They show girls looking to the future as they made the difficult decision to surrender, believing that separation afforded the best chance of success for their babies. They also make clear that this belief reflected the cultural biases and limited choices available to single, white pregnant girls in midcentury America. Following the advice of parents and social workers and cognizant of the double standard that held girls, but not boys, responsible for upholding traditional standards of sexual propriety, the young women who surrendered their babies often felt they had no other choice.
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